Even More Kesey Tributes Page
Thanks to everyone who sent stuff in honor of Kesey.
If it's not on the site yet, it soon will be...Rick
From Larry Nelson
In about 1967 I got a very brief ride in the psychedelic bus (called
"Further") with Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal
Cassady at the wheel (while he was tripped out on acid or something).
Fortunately we weren't going fast or far or I would have gotten off the
bus for my own safety. But it was an experience that I'll *never*
forget. Cassady was so loaded that he was falling out of the seat and
writhing around on the bus floor periodically while he was "driving."
Ginsberg was seated on a high stool playing finger cymbals and chanting
a mantra with his bald head looking out through the plexiglass front
dome on the bus. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were sprawled about on
the floor and on couches, etc., listening to very loud music. They were
on my campus for a poetry reading by Ginsberg. The same weekend, the
Jefferson Airplane was on campus for a concert that turned into sort of
a concert/dance/pot party. I was a straight kid from a small town who
was involved in managing activities programs and who learned a lot in a
hurry. But I'm glad I experienced it. And the psychedelic bus was
something to behold.
From Patrick by way of IntrepidTrips.com
I'm currently living in Maine but I happened to be in Eugene on Nov 10th of
last year for my best buddy's wedding ... so I, playing the part of Best
Man, was up very early on Nov 10th going over what I needed to say that
night. Pulled right-out of sleep by the need to write, way before the sun
came up ... and then later, I found out about Ken, after putting on the
radio. ... I was stunned ... and then profoundly honored knowing that I
could be there for Ken on Wednesday at the MacDonald Theater. ... through
Ken's art-filled living he appeared to me to be a very great and joyous and
talented and kind man! Shining light on everyone. Healing and revealing. I'm
still warmed and guided by him. Thanks, Ken!
Here's a poem also by Patrick
The Last I Saw of Ken
Kesey's wake was elegant.
His crazy multi-hued whorling
day glow coffin sat alone
in the spotlight middle
of an old dark opera stage
in downtown Eugene.
A jazz combo, sax and piano
(sometimes bass and piano),
played softly to the side,
nearly in the wings.
Many extraordinary words
were spoken by his good chums,
and all of them came to one
resounding consensus
that Kesey's life was
his best work of art
and that we are all still
bathing in its joyous
revealing.
I cried like a baby in the balcony.
Stephanie drank her whiskey
with a scoop of Wavy Gravy.
We got to see home movies
of Ken getting all goofy
in the woods, dancing
and laughing and signing.
It was a profoundly bright day
in Oregon when they
tethered that coffin
to the back of The Bus
and drove him off
toward the rolling
wooded green to bury him
somewhere on his farm
in Pleasant Hill.
R.I.P. Ken Kesey
1935 - 2001
From John by way of IntrepidTrips.com
I Partyed with Kesey and the
Pranksters at the Mu Farm in early 70's while living at Rainbow Commune.
Great party. They pranked our commune, as they told us the date of party
was changed to Holloween instead the day before. As Rodney ( the Fiddler
who made beer throughout oregon and showed up when the beer was ready with
his fiddle) was leaving Rainbow with another musician and Wally the
local(redneck) hippie originally from Drain Ore., the morning before party.
I asked them where they were going, they said to the Mu farm to practice
for the party tomorrow. Wally had a twinkle in his eye , even visable
through his Coke bottle thick glasses. I new immediately, he was lying and
some thing was up! As they pulled out of the parking lot. I looked at Wayne
and said lets Hitch into Drain and catch up with them at the local Diner
and see what's up? We walk in to the Diner and there they were. We said,
What's up? They replied Laughingly it's a prank on Rainbow the party 's
today. So we arrived early with the Musicians. Bowls of the Kind Pot, Kesy
with a Vile of Acid. The Mu farms Band played led by Fletcher, as Kesy,
dressed as a Priest, and the Pranksters were playing feedback music at the
other end of the barn. Fun nite! The rest of Rainbow came straggling into
the party about 10pm some with skouls on there face and costumeless as they
were caught off guard, but most of them took the prank in good spirit. and
we partyed on! Did apple bobing contest , floor got wet, we were dancing ,
running spinning and sliding as the bands played to our movement, with
Kesey on Harmonica rapping through the Harp about the many varied things
happening in the barn. Wild nite! Latter 30yrs. later. It dawned on me,
Being as Rainbw took the Prank in good sport, this could be why, they made
Rainbow Commune backstage security at the Grateful Dead concert at Eugene
country fair grounds after that. Fun time had by all. I met Jerry, he was a
friendly wise big Teddy Bear kind of guy sitting in a full Lotus on the
grass back stage
From George Walker by way of IntrepidTrips.com
It seems it's barely stopped raining, except to snow, since we buried Ken. I drove to SF in the rain, parked, walked into the library in the rain. An hour early, already a crowd, lined up on the stairs and toward the street. Later I heard a thousand stood outside, in the rain, wanting to be there. That's the way it was with Ken, everybody wanted to be there. And here they were again, Chloe, Roy, and Annie; Jim Wolpman, Joe Lysowski (who could spell that?), Stuart Brand; Jim and Dorothy; Anne Murphy with Jamie Cassady, and John Cassady; Rosanna
Lordeaux, Bob; Karen Laird; Mountain Girl, and Barlow; and more, lots
more. We all spoke, briefly, only got 3 minutes, give us the hook,
they lock the doors at 8, can't be late. Country Joe sang. They
showed some Kesey film. I told about getting the bus. Everybody
seemed to like it, it was a good time, made us feel good. MG really said it all: it's events that
bring us together, we need more events.
Think Field Trip '02.
From John by way of IntrepidTrips.com
On behalf of the Pendleton Players:
We are the Pendleton High School Drama Department and last January Kesey
and Faye were so very kind and generous to allow we as a cast and crew of
"Cuckoo's Nest" to come down and visit. Their kindness and hospitality to
travellers was not the exception but rather the rule. They provided us,
like all they touch (I'm keeping this all in the present tense- for as
Kesey appeared to be fond of saying- "it's all a work in progress"), the
inspiration to go out and live our lives, not spend them in idle pasivity.
We are not ghouls, ghosts, goblins or even spooks, we are just a bunch of
strong backs. If Faye needs any weeding, painting, wood chopped, split or
stacked, drop us a line at this email address and we'll mount up and head
down to lend a hand.
We are about to open "Bus Stop" over hear in Mike Hagen-land after
Thanksgiving. We will donate a Ben Franklin to Kate's theatre group as a
way of showing thanks for last January.
Take care y'all and keep on going Furthur. We're with you for the long haul.
From Adam by way of IntrepidTrips.com
FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FRIENDSHIP
By
Adam Scott Cushman
"Who in the hell is Ken Kesey?" my soon to be wife and presently pregnant lady called from the shower of the Gateway Motel in Bend, Oregon. Thus far we had traveled Yosemite, Frisco/Haight, the Redwoods, Gold Beach, Crater Lake, Roseburg, Coos Bay and Eugene. Each day was a revelation of American beauty, but challenging was the realization that we'd embarked on a three-month road expedition during the last month of Tammy's first trimester. Thus, I was clinging to a Zen place with both fists clenched and my face so flushed I ought to have an aneurysm.
Back in Eugene I'd been reading White Noise in some downtown bookstore and realizing my insignificance as a writer. Simplicity has never been my strong suit and the man's gift for brevity was almost embarrassing. Yet, I was hopelessly addicted to being put in my place by the greats: Blake, Rimbaud, Yeats, Kerouac, 'Ginsey,' Kesey…wait a second, I thought: Kesey has a farm out here I seemed to recall hearing or reading somewheres. I made a mental note to research this when Tammy came to get me from her solo travels and we were back at the motel.
After Delillo had humiliated me enough, I decided to walk around downtown and wander Eugene for whatever found me. I went to a head shop and bought Tammy a green bomber jacket for thirty bucks. She had always wanted one and I thought it might ease some of the hormonal tension and claustrophobia that was afflicting the trip somewhat.
I was thoroughly caffeinated and couldn't bum a cigarette to save my life. You would think I was selling Amway. Auspicious, I resolved, because I had recently quit and Tammy's sense of smell during those months was uncanny. I'd get the ice treatment for a week if she picked up on the scent. As I waited for Tammy curbside a twelve-year-old Spanish kid tried to sell me weed. I'd been dying to smoke since we'd left Venice two weeks ago, but my pesky conscience just wouldn't allow me to indulge like this. I told him to go home and watch Lion King or something.
When Tammy picked me up I hid the bomber jacket in the trunk and didn't give it to her until morning. Back at the motel I showered and searched for the whereabouts of Kesey online. What I found was his company, "Intrepid Trips" and I emailed something to the effect of: "I am a fellow road trippin' literarean on the brink of fatherhood and I would cherish the chance to see and photograph the bus Furthur if that is possible." I went to bed wishing that I'd taken the little drug trafficking shit up on his offer.
I woke up while Tammy was in the shower and hung the bomber jacket in the tiny closet space where it would be the first thing she saw. She passed by it three or four times before she realized it was there. In the course of three months we drove to Maine and back, literally circulating the country and in every state and every photograph, she dons the jacket in all its green glory.
After arriving in Bend and adding it to the short list of places we could see ourselves living in years to come, we checked into the aforementioned Gateway Motel where I found an email from Kesey: written was a number to call for directions.
There are moments in ones life that they will not forget and they know this when the moment passes and not in hindsight.
'Who in the hell is Ken Kesey?" she hollered from the bubble bath where she baked our baby.
I tried to illustrate the implications of receiving a written response from somebody of such revolutionary, historic, creative and mythological timber, but telling her of …Cuckoos Nest, …Notion…, Further and Cassady left her relatively unimpressed.
"Imagine your dad meeting Mickey Mantle," I tried, or "my dad meeting Francis Bacon."
"Your dad doesn't paint."
"The other Francis Bacon," I said but all that was being registered was that a drive back to Eugene for a visit would mean the world to me and there was no promise that we would even meet the man but we would get to see a school bus of legendary proportions or whatever was left of it. I told her that I didn't have any expectations. She groaned and went back to her pregnancy book, but her acquiescence was genuinely heartfelt, just veiled at the time.
After the best breakfast of the trip in an authentic little western town called Sisters, we cruised back down and around the winding snow covered mountain highway and into the Oregonian countryside. The roads to the farm at Mt. Pleasant were what we'd been trying to stick to throughout the trip. We'd made a conscious effort to avoid the interstate and all the homogeneity there associated at all costs, or at the very least, at some expense. Train tracks to our left brought Cassady to mind as did bushes bring images of Patrick the Punk, white faced, Indian style in brush, poised for the passing school buses, appearing phantomlike only to little girls.
We came upon a big red barn and pulled into the dirt driveway of the Kesey estate. Faye Kesey greeted us and showed us to the barn that housed Furthur, or should I say, Furthur's hulking child. I'm not certain at what point I started to feel like I had the soul of a tourist, posing awkwardly to the left of the golden jester of a hood ornament, Tammy snapping frames, telling me to smile. I couldn't smile. Sure, I was a kid who had certainly taken the beat tour, knew all the names, kept a Keenan photo of Cassady in San Quenten and had spent hours at City Lights only days before, even had a "Best of Rexroth' paperback to show for it. I'd looked for Ferlinghetti at the cash register but found a goateed guy with a dragon tattoo on his neck and a scowl. I was clinging to a world that had shaped me since my youth, but to which I did not belong.
After Tammy's done taking my mug shots she's giving me the 'let's abort' look.
Faye's not giving anything away and I can sense from her silence that we're not the first strangers to stop by and certainly not the first who might as well have just come from Disneyland wearing mouse ears, khaki shorts and fluorescent green visors. All the while I'm waiting for Kesey to walk into the barn or hear a voice in the yard calling the dog but there is nothing except my skinny self, fawning at this vehicular collage of infamy, an awkward Tammy and Faye, both clearly waiting for us to leave. I realized that if I were Faye-gauging the vibe from her shoes- I might feel exactly the same way.
As we left the barn and were about to be on our way, I asked her about purchasing the prankster's Look For a Kool Place videotape. She directed us to Kesey's office vaguely, with a genuine smile of the eyes saying, "Just up the road. Near the post office. You'll find it."
Find it we did, but not a prankster was stirring.
I conned Tammy into a Banana split across the street at Dairy Queen. A good hour was spent in lunchtime debauchery where we fell on the topic of stalkers. I'd never been stalked, as far as I knew, but I told her how in college a friend of mine had a girl break into his car and prop an 8x10 framed picture of herself on the center console. I guess there are moments when a person can desire another's acceptance so much that they will embarrass themselves unknowingly; call it love, idolatry, or at times, simple admiration. Whatever the case, when we did drive back across the street post-Dairy Queen, I did knock on the door to Intrepid Trips and I did receive no answer. I reasoned it as fate and got my ass back in the truck. Tammy could see the disappointment that I refused to admit and kissed me with a sympathy that was so perfectly subtle I almost proposed to her right there and not two months later on a snow covered picnic table in the Grand Tetons.
Instead, an old jalopy pulled in next to us.
The first thing I remember about meeting Kesey was a warm consistency in his features. No widening of the eyes or farcical smile to satisfy social graces or decorum. When I introduced myself he looked at me with the look he kept throughout the visit, his eyes narrowed as if a strong wind were blowing against his face and lines around the mouth from heartfelt grins. We shook hands and he asked if I'd anyone with me. I told him my girlfriend and he invited us inside. "What a foreign concept," I thought, "accepting someone into your life, even for just a little while, with the simple credit that they are people, same as you, searching their way through the rubble of the world, digging for a door." Without suspicion, or trust for that matter. Simple humanity. Idyllic. Babbs was already on his way out when Kesey sat us down by the Avid. We gave him the run-down on where we'd been thus far and our thoughts on what we'd seen. Understand, me talking to Kesey about road travel is like a stand-in talking to Brando about the method. What's more, old Marlon might not be so receptive should you be in his neighborhood and ask to stop by and photograph his Tux from The Godfather and chitchat about craft. But we all start somewhere and we all have people who come before us. Maybe they're heroes, maybe just predecessors and maybe some of them are at times mentors.
Kesey dug into his film archives and dragged out some vintage Cassady footage. I thought that I was well versed on the Furthur era and all but I had no idea that the man talked as fast as he drove and for as long. To watch him in that driver's seat changed all my preconceptions. I would guess that few understood him. His words are abstract and don't seem to make much sense but there is no question in my mind that not only does he make sense, his senses are made of what Blake and Huxley truly meant by the infinite. After five minutes of watching the man and his mind, I decided that there was no question that he was consciousness. Now, most of us are not consciousness, hell most of us are not even our own consciousness and in some cases we are not even our bodies. Some of us are no more than branding numbers, tax returns, pensions and resumes. There was something about Cassady that made me aware that what he was saying was genius.
"Did he do that the whole time," I asked, "without stopping?"
He nodded with a smirk. I could see Neal's reflection from the monitor in Kesey's eye, almost smirking back from the eternity that the whole Merry Bunch had created. Kesey elaborated with the tale of 'Love Potion Number Nine' and how years later he realized that from this song he might have discovered that Cassady was some sort of a prophet. He said that some of them thought he might have been just out of his mind, but you watch this stuff and things gradually start to make sense.
We watched Millbrook footage, at the time unreleased, and I asked if when cut, this new edition of the saga would clear up certain Wolfeian misconceptions to which Kesey said that it probably would for some. After I'd my full dose of visual prankster nostalgia, he closed the Avid window and we chatted about what he was up to, his previous European venture and the anticipated trip to Cuba. "Shit," I thought, " what I wouldn't do for a seat on that ride."
"All abbbbooooaaaard!"
Outside of the Intrepid headquarters we said our goodbyes and Kesey asked that we let him know as to our whereabouts from time to time.
On the way back to Bend, as I wrestled with the fact that I had spent an hour or so with one of the revolutionary ringleaders of the twentieth century, I came to the resolution that we are all on tour, regardless if we stay in the same town forever or travel the world, and that there is nothing wrong with either choice, but our wandering bones and our need to experience, this is part of what makes us so human, so miraculous at the core.
As the white winter roads drove us further around to Bend, I structured the latter half of the twentieth century in my mind. The sixties was the rager-the seventies was for those who wanted to stay up past midnight and finish the keg-the eighties was the hangover-the nineties was a miserably failed attempt to repeat the rager-and now the new times, thus far it seemed, was a far cry from the exciting insinuations of twentieth century cinema and sci-fi, or the promises made by the prophets. So far, things were pretty mundane.
Tammy kept smiling at the way I was smirking, but saw that something was gradually suffocating my mood.
"What is it?"
I hesitated and shook my head (which I now believe could be a form of lying.) Seconds later, as if I'd silently changed the subject I asked her if she'd any idea who we'd just hung out with. Tammy shrugged and made me fall in love with her all over again as she continues to do each and every day.
"Just a sweet old guy."
Like I said, simplicity is the soul of the wise and has never been my strong suit.
But I'm learning
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